I picked up this NAS from Amazon for 379.99 and filled it with four 2TB drives. This is hands down the best NAS I have ever used for the home. I would easily recommend this NAS for home and small business networks (20 or less PCs with no server).

The performance is great when plugged into a gigabit network, I get great write an read speeds. The only complaint on accessing files when the unit is waking up from "hibernation".... SLOW wake up time. For a quick sec you wonder if you PC is connecting to the drive or thinking about connecting. Once it wakes up and the drives start spinning it is off to the races!

With ANY NAS software is the key. Synology's DSM 4.1(Disk Station Manager)is what separates this NAS from other products. They also have great iPhone and Android apps that let you access all your files from you phone or tablet. This NAS lets you create your own cloud and it works! QNAP makes good stuff, but for easy of use and features I am sticking with Synology. A little pricey compared to other NASes, but I am glad I spent the extra money. I was going to build a NAS with FreeNAS and an old PC, but the thought of burning electricity all the time made me spend the money on the DiskStation DS413j.

Would highly recommend.

110 di 112 persone hanno trovato utile la seguente recensione

5.0 su 5 stelleMy first NAS... and you're not prying it out of my arms.20 settembre 2012

Di
Peter Brockie
- Pubblicato su Amazon.com

The Synology j series are the "basic" models of their Network Attached Storage products with the "plain" (DS413, DS213) series being midrange and the "+" series being the highest end consumer versions.

Unlike many other companies, Synology doesn't artificially cripple their models depending on their cost for the most part. The j series model has all the same features from file sharing, video sharing, IP camera recording, etc. The two things which change between the series are the CPU/RAM and external ports.

As a j series model the DS413j has only the basic 2x USB 2.0 ports and a 1.6 GHz ARM-based CPU. Moving up the line you start to get things like eSATA, USB 3.0 and SD card readers. The highest end models have either PowerPC (Freescale) or Intel Atom CPUs. Do you need the faster CPU? If you're just using it for file serving, etc. No. You probably don't. If you're going to use the NAS for either photo viewing or video transcoding - yeah, you might want to spend the extra money as the lack of a floating point unit makes image thumbnail generation really slow on the ARM CPUs and some transcoding packages are only available for the x86 Atom chips.

As for the ARM chip and 512 MB of RAM in this model, it's pretty easy to max out the processor doing a couple things at once, but it doesn't really slow things down. Under normal use you won't notice it. The RAM is rarely full past 40% or so.

-*The DTV dongles supported are NOT compatible in the US/Canada. Overseas only.-External hard drives can't be added to a RAID or shared normally.-HFS/HFS+ drives are STILL not supported!-Synology charges a lot of money for additional cameras past 1 (around $60 a camera!).

The good news about the bad stuff is most of it can be added/fixed with software updates.

UPDATE:

I've had it for a little while now and still no problems. The more I use the iOS apps, the more I find they're pretty limited (I haven't tried the photo/video/music ones), but the administration one is quite lame - it's basically a system info. Even the mobile web interface is pretty much a list of settings with no way to change them.

The DS413 is now listed on Amazon for a less than $100 difference. In hindsight I would probably have gotten the DS413 over the DS413j. Why? Double the memory - although it is rarely used in my day-to-day tasks, I suspect it is the main limiting factor when new OS updates come out. I wouldn't be surprised if the extra $100 gets you one for version than the j (getting cut off at DSM 7.0 instead of 6.0 or whatever).

One thing I did notice, however, is the blue power LED is -insanely- bright. It might as well be a flashlight!

I gave this unit 4 stars because of the price and the print server doesn't work as well as it should. Even though its price is competitive with other brands it is still a little too expensive for the consumer market. It is hard to justify a box with no disks that costs nearly $400 when you can get a 2TB USB drive for around a hundred bucks.

The reason I bought this was that I had all my collected videos, software backups, etc. on a 2TB drive I'd added to my computer. It was nearly full and I had no backup for it so if it failed all would be gone. Over the years I've had many drives die so I know it is always a matter of when not if.

I've read all the reviews and Synology and Qnap are always at the top. I like the Synology Hybrid RAID (SHR) which uses standard RAID but allows you to utilize different sized drives and upgrade to larger drives at a later date. The Disk Station Manager (DSM) software is great. DSM is a web based OS that you access with your web browser. You don't need to install anything on your computer.

When I purchased the DS413j I also bought two Western Digital 3TB Red drives. The Red drives are a little more expensive but my hope is that they should have a longer life. I also threw in a pair of 500GB Green drives that I had been using for backup purposes. I don't know that Western Digital is any better or worse than the other brands but my experience with their warranty dept. is what sells me on them. If a drive does fail they make it super easy to get it replaced.

Setup was very easy. Just install your drives, plug the included Ethernet cable into your network, turn it on and log in using your web browser. You'll download the latest DSM software and go through a simple setup walk-through. Note that any data on your drives will be erased as they will be reformatted during the setup process. SHR will be the default choice but you can use any RAID settings you desire. In a matter of minutes you will be greeted with the DSM desktop where you can start playing with all the features of your new Diskstation. Note that performance will be significantly reduced for many hours as a background check on all your disks is performed. It took over a day for mine to complete but I was already transferring files which I am sure slowed down the process.

I was disappointed to find out that the print server doesn't allow for two-way communication. I attached my inkjet printer to the Diskstation's USB port and found it easy to set up. I can print just fine but get no data back from the printer about things such as ink levels.

My main use for the Diskstation is movie storage. DVDs are a pain to deal with. I've been ripping all my DVDs and saving them to my Diskstation. I use my Tivo to watch them on my TV using the free PyTivo software. Currently I have PyTivo running on my PC and accessing the files on my Diskstation. I have read that people are running PyTivo on their Diskstations but I haven't tried it yet and am a little concerned that the CPU in the DS413j might struggle in transcoding video.

As far as speed goes I rarely notice a difference when dealing with files on the Diskstation over files on my PC's local drive. I get average real world transfers of 35-40MB/s over my gigabit network.

Overall it is a nice little unit. I am glad to have the added security of RAID so that if a drive fails I can replace it and not lose my data. I am aware that RAID isn't a substitute for a real back up but it is much better than storing files on a single disk that isn't backed up! When I win the Lottery I'll get a second Diskstation to back up my first one to.

This is my first experience setting up a home server, and I really don't think that it could have been easier. I was able to install four hard drives and get the thing up and running in about 10 minutes. Formating and other set-up was a breeze. All of the menus and the basic desktop of the machine will seem familiar to anyone who has worked in a Windows or OSX environment. For basic functionality, no command-line installation required (although you certainly could if you'd like) ... Synology has a "package center" where you can install lots of different useful server functions (think of it like an "app store"). It's also very quiet, such that I don't mind having it running all the time.

I've had no problems using this NAS as a video server, photo server, audio server, etc. Synology also provides a free DDNS service, if you'd like to be able to access all of your data and media from remote locations. I can now sit in a coffee shop with any laptop and stream movies or high-fidelity music files right over the internet (this capility will depend on your upload speed from home). Moving files to my client computers within my LAN or remotely is quick and easy--I'm able to log-in from my Mac and browse the box's contents through a Finder window.

These are just some examples of what this machine's features and capabilities. Overall, this basic NAS just does what it is supposed to do and makes the whole process as easy as I can imagine. Very happy with this purchase.

I have been dealing with large storage arrays professionally for years. I've always run at least one "server" at home, and a few years ago decided to build my own NAS functionality. I spent a small fortune on 2TB drives, a giant case, and PCI SATA boards. I put up with a noisy, always on server in our small apartment that couldn't easily be rebooted into other OS'es (after wonkiness with virtualization).

When it came time to expand, I decided to look at simple consumer/prosumer NAS devices. This exactly fit the bill. The software experience is excellent (better then most high SANs I've worked with!), it integrates cleanly with OSX (including TimeMachine, google for setting up appletalk volumes and quotas) as well as Linux (nfs), and I presume Windows, though I haven't tried that yet. It's relatively quiet, very compact, and easy to tuck out of the way.

The only negative I've experienced is you cannot add a drive that is smaller then existing drives. I bought two new 4TB drives, then decided to repurpose a couple of 2TB drives from the old SAN. They cannot be used to expand a volume, only to create a new volume. You can replace smaller drives with larger, or add equal or larger drives, but if you intend to mix, make sure you start off with the smallest drives you plan to use.